Amazon has announced GameOn, a cross-platform, competitive gaming service, built on the AWS cloud infrastructure. It will allow developers to create competitions with real-world prizes fulfilled by Amazon.

Amazon GameOn is intended to gives developers tools to drive engagement, increase monetization, and attract more players by offering real-world prizes fulfilled by Amazon or other in-game rewards.

Marja Koopmans, Director, Amazon Competitive Gaming explains:

“Game developers have consistently told us they are looking for ways to increase player engagement and retention. We built Amazon GameOn to give developers simple, yet powerful tools to foster community through competitive gameplay.”

GameOn, which is already being used by nWay, Game Insight, Millennial Esports’ Eden Games, Umbrella Games, Nazara, Mindstorm, Mokuni, Avix, and GameCloud Studios in games ranging from casual to core across different genres, currently supports leaderboards, leagues, and multi-round competitions and gives developers the flexibility to create custom events such as local and regional competitions. Developers can also enable players and streamers to create their own user-generated competitions and invite participants, allowing players to connect with friends and expand their gaming network.

Millennial Esports’ Eden Games, the developer of racing franchises including V-Rally and Test Drive Unlimited, uses Amazon GameOn to scale the size of the competitions they run in Gear.Club. According to Pascal Clarysse GameOn has made it easy to add leaderboards and tournaments and saved Eden Games months of development.

As GameOn is built on AWS it works on any operating system and gives developers the ability to scale quickly. The GameOn API makes it easy to add competitive, prize-based play to a game leaving developers to concentrate on making a great game.

Developers can use GameOn APIs for free until May 1, 2018. After that date, the first 35,000 plays per month are free for a limited time, then developers will pay $0.003 per play. Real-world prizing fulfilled by Amazon is only available in the US at launch.

So as well as wanting to dominate the Voice market, Amazon is looking to establish itself as the principal prize giver in the growing arena of competitive games.

GitHub has announced that GitHub Free now includes unlimited private repositories for projects with up to three collaborators. It has also combined its cloud and self-hosted services into a unified Gi [ ... ]